


Ripples

by theprophetlemonade



Series: Droplets and Ripples [4]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Beach Setting, Confession, Drabble, Droplets!verse, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Marco PoV, Pining, Pool Boy AU, Rewrite of scene from Chapter 19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-16
Updated: 2015-04-16
Packaged: 2018-03-23 07:13:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3759208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theprophetlemonade/pseuds/theprophetlemonade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco fell in love with Jean like droplets in the ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ripples

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted as Tumblr exclusive for Droplets' 1st birthday, 13/04/2015.
> 
> I asked my Tumblr followers what they most wanted to see, and the overwhelming majority asked for the confession scene from Marco's point of view. So I complied. I worked this along side the Jean POV of this scene, so they overlap nicely.

The pebble between my fingers is small and flat, rubbed like sea glass by the ocean that has spat it up on the sandy shore – maybe thousands of miles away from home, or maybe from a cove just around the corner of the limestone coast. I will never know.

I turn the stone over in my palms, rubbing my thumb over the scar-line of white that patterns the grey, bullet-like rock.

I’m not sure if a bullet between my ribs would hurt more. I mean, maybe I’m not bleeding. I’m definitely not bleeding. I have no broken bones, no scrapes and bruises, no weeping wounds to speak of. But it’s just the same as tossing a pebble like this into a pool – say, Jean’s swimming pool – and watching the ripples it would cause. The waves would bob from end to end, stretching out as concentric circles that slosh up against the sides of the mosaic walls, splattering the concrete and the grass with water.

I figure the feeling must be similar –  _ripples_. You imagine being shot, and feeling that seismic shift of vibrations echo through your body, or blow you backwards, winding you. Like in the movies. People don’t remain standing when they’re shot.

Saying that, I think ripples are easier.  _Bullets_ , are easier.

This pebble, if I were to toss it now into the sea that stretches to the horizon before me, would be swallowed up by its enormity. I find myself unable to look any longer at the ocean.

I roll the pebble flat between my palms, somehow wishing it were rougher, and I turn back to face Jean.

He hates the water, but he doesn’t understand how much I see it in him. What difference is there between him and the ocean, anyway? There are waves, and swirling depths, and storms in his eyes that make me blanch because they’re so conflicted, and at the end of the day, I could end up drowning in both. Maybe more willingly in  _him_ , rather than cold, murky depths that are too dark to illuminate.

I don’t want to be just a pebble to him in the grand scheme of things. I don’t want to be buffeted by the tide, to have my edges smoothed out and my transparency clouded and frosted-over by far too many years spent in the company of saltwater. It’s been like this for too long. I want to make a choice. I want to  _matter_  to him. More than this. More than just being something to pity at the pool side.

“I don’t want us to be limited to twice a week, Jean,” I say, and my voice sounds too grave, too dooming. It doesn’t sound like myself, and because of that, I feel my jaw clench involuntarily. I think Jean flinches. It’s only a tiny movement, and maybe it’s just a twitch he can’t control, but the part of me that wants to make this hurt  _more_  tells me that what I see is him biting down hard on his lower lip to keep in the words he undoubtedly wants to scold me with. “I don’t … I  _never_  wanted that.”

My fingers still, and I curl them slowly around the small pebble, squeezing it into my palm.

 _I never wanted that_.

I don’t know how to explain it any better – not without pushing him away. Not without making him want to run, and oh God, I wouldn’t blame him.

How do I tell him that I never wanted that, because twice a week could  _never_  be enough for me? That what an awful thing it can be to find yourself daydreaming every morning and wishing the week away, for want of just two days of seven – those days spent with Jean, because  _Jean_ —

Because there was nothing I wanted more than to know him. Because he was different. Because he was never complicated by the things that clouded me. Because he was sharp-witted, and sharp-tongued, and there was something about the glimmer as he rolled his eyes at something his mom said on that first day that planted in a seed in my heart that I knew I wanted to water.

Because there was nothing I wanted more than to be his friend. I saw the demons he battled with, and I knew I wanted to be there for him as he figured out how to scramble over them. I wanted to be there to hold his hand as he learned how to hold his breath long enough not to inhale their pollutants. I saw in him a spark that wasn’t like anyone else I ever knew, and I wanted that. Maybe I coveted it. Maybe it was selfish.

Because there is nothing I think I want more than to let myself be in love with him. Because I am – and it’s an honest and unshakable truth. He doesn’t need to be in love with me, but I … I am with him.

And when you’re in love with someone, is any period of time ever  _enough_? I wanted more. I still want more. But he doesn’t have to give me that – I wouldn’t ask it of him. I wouldn’t— I can’t. I can’t. He clearly doesn’t want to cope with that. With  _me_.

My eyes meet Jean’s across the sand, and his wild, wide-eyed stare as he follows my every movement like a flittering bird, skittish and nervous as he keeps his fingers twisted in the fabric of his jeans.

He didn’t even change last night. Did he sleep? How long did he stay sat outside in the sand, watching the idle fire die and the stars be born, poking at the shards of rocks and shells beneath his feet as he contemplated just how to say that what we have isn’t healthy for him anymore? Because it has to be that, doesn’t it? He doesn’t deserve all this baggage I’m dragging with me, not on top of everything he’s dealing with at home. He doesn’t deserve the extra panic. He doesn’t deserve me breaking that trust, he doesn’t—

Oh, but I still want to tell him. I don’t need an answer. I just want to tell him.

Any amount of time spent with him was  _never_  enough.

I cast my eyes back down at the stone, but notice when Jean awkwardly shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his flip-flops squeaking in the sand. He chews angrily on his lip, and his eyebrows are knitted into a fierce scowl.

I can’t tell if he’s angry, or if he’s hurt. Maybe it’s both. I said horrible things to him.

“I don’t want that either, Marco,” he says, and it takes me by surprise. For a moment, I can’t even remember what the last thing I said  _was_.

But, then—

_I don’t want our friendship to be limited to what we’re forced to have._

I straighten up, and my eyes fly up, meeting his once more with earnest intensity. He just looks surprised, and scuffles backwards half a step or so, caught off guard. He reminds me of a deer in car headlights, frozen in the bright score of the yellow beam, unsure whether to run left or right or just have the car plough straight into him.

Maybe that’s what he wants – to be hit with it. Maybe he wants to have this conversation – because I have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he knows, at least something, because he’s smart, he knows me, he feels  _something_ , surely—

“Y-you don’t?” I squeak, the breath caught in my throat as I watch him bite into his lip so hard I fear it might bleed.

“I don’t,” he assures me, his voice trembling, and I can’t help but let that pent-up breath escape as a sharp expulsion of relief, deflating my chest and shoulders. I press the small pebble into one fist, and bring my knuckles to my lips, trying to conceal the way I know I shake – my eyes flit to the limestone cliffs behind Jean, hoping maybe there will be more answers and more advice in the chalky crags than in Jean’s white face, but I’m unlucky.

“I … I thought,” I begin slowly, muffling my voices behind my fist, “I thought that you wouldn’t … wouldn’t want to  _see_  me again. After – after what I  _said_  to you.”

Jean shakes his head and his jaw clenches. The fringes of his bed-mused hair tickle across his forehead, and I wish, more than anything, to rid myself of this vapid space between us, and swipe my fingers across his forehead. Maybe touch his shoulder, or the side of his neck. Find his hand in mine if I were fortunate.

I don’t want to have to stand at a distance and reminisce over the things I shouted at him when my throat was clogged with tears, and I didn’t realise how much I needed him until it was too late.

It wasn’t his fault. How could it be? I should never have implied that it was. Even if there were times when I could never quite tell which side of the line his glances or his touches were erring on – if they were pale and platonic and innocent, or if there was something a little pink about them, and the way he says my name so honestly – I should never have told him. I know better than that. I know what sort of spiral my words must have thrown him into, and I know how much he hates swimming. I imagine it must be even harder when there’s a current to fight your stroke against.

It all manifests itself now in the way my ears become deaf to the rush of the sea over the shoreline, or of the wind through the dune grass, or of seagulls squawking, or of sand crumbling beneath my feet – and all I seem to hear are his heavy breaths. He curls his arms around his chest and seems to shrink in on himself, shoulders hunching as he bows his head, and I think he shakes – like shivers, if it weren’t too warm for them, even at this hour of the crowning sunrise.

I’m not sure if I’ve seen Jean cry – properly, at least. I’ve seen him shed tears, and I’ve seen him scared, terrified to the bone, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen big, fat,  raindrops of salty water. I don’t think I want to – it would spoil the illusion that he’s strong.

( _He is strong_ , I try to tell myself.  _He is strong, even if he cries. He would tell me that_.  _He would shake it into me until the world spun in front of my eyes._ )

But I wonder, now, if this is the onset to this thing that I haven’t yet seen of him. He holds himself so tightly, and all the things that cross his face are so confused, and so malleable, and he seems to flick between so many different feelings at once, that I wonder if he can keep up with them all. I don’t think he can.

_Please don’t cry, Jean. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that this happened. I’m sorry that I love you more than just a friend. I’m sorry I said those awful things to you. Please don’t cry._

“Of course I want to see you,” he croaks out, and it makes my heart wheeze, staggering on its last legs as it tries to supply my body with enough blood to keep me standing upright, and not keeling forwards, towards him, like I know I really want, deep down inside of myself.

I don’t want him to hurt because of me. I don’t want him to have more than his fair share of pain – because he’s been dealt a hand already too much for him. He’s fragile. He’s strong, but he’s fragile. People don’t realise.

I bite my lip –  _hard_  – and turn my eyes to the ground, staring firmly at the way wet sand now clings like cement to my toes, gritty and granulated against my skin. The tide sloshes up behind me, not quite licking my heels, but crawling close enough that it will submerge the soles of my feet in a few minutes. I hear the sigh of sea-foam evaporating in the juvenile sunlight, and the sand exhaling as the lapping waves diminish back into the surf.

I shouldn’t have forced him away, because it hurt him. I can hear it in the timor in his weak voice. But I shouldn’t have burdened him with my pain too, because it’s so heavy. I’ve surely done wrong by him either way. Surely,  _surely_ —

Jean speaks again before I have the chance to; before I have the time to figure out how to tell him that he doesn’t owe me anything – especially not his time if it hurts him to give it to me. Especially not that.

He says  _of course he wants to see me_ , but I don’t understand what is  _of course_  about it. It doesn’t seem that simple.

“I … I don’t want you to have to deal with me if I—” He struggles to get the words out, and I watch silently as he grits his teeth and curses his own frustration. His voice becomes a whisper. “If I’m a  _burden_  to you. You don’t deserve that, Marco.”

 _A … a burden_?

I know my mouth falls open, and I figure my eyes must be wide in shock, because Jean’s expression mimics it, regret plastered like paint strokes across his face. It does nothing for his sharp cheekbones, or the thin line of his lips, or the hazel colour of his honey-warm eyes, or the curve of his pretty jaw – because it’s  _fear_. There’s a part of him that’s scared, and I’ve come to know it well.

(Is it a good thing or a bad thing, to know how fear manifests itself in him? Because it means he’s opened himself up enough to show me, but, at the same time, it means I’ve seen him scared far too many times for it to sit comfortably on my beating heart.)

I turn back to the sea, because seeing him scared like this is something I can’t quite manage. Seeing him believe that he is a burden, when he is more a— when I am really—

I breathe in and out, filling my lungs with salty sea air and the brine of kelp that clings to the rocks buried beneath the waves.

He’s not a burden. He could never be. He’s the one who alleviates the weight on my shoulders, and help me lift the things I have to keep elevated above my head. Around him, I don’t forget, but I can accept. I can dull the pain, and the way my limbs ache, and I can realise that, against him, sadness is always going to pale.

He’s not a burden. Maybe he’s other things – he brings with him things that makes my head swim and my mind swirl and my heart compress with fierce beats of frustration when I find myself unable to read the intensity in the looks he throws my way when he thinks no-one’s watching. I would trade the days when I learned about his family, about his father, about Eren and the water, for more afternoons sunlit by the pool – but at the same time, those things are just as much a part of him as my father’s illness was, and is, a part of me. They make him who he is. I still fell in love with those parts of him.

It doesn’t make him a burden. He just hates himself enough to believe, in his own, little mercury heart, that he is.

I don’t think twice about flicking the pebble between my fingers out into the open ocean – it hits the water with a single plop, suctioning below the water with a gulp that gets lost in the crest of a wave sweeping towards the shoreline. It disappears quickly into the hazy-gold sand stirred up in clouds beneath the surface of the water by the undulating current.

He’s not a burden. I need to tell him that he’s not. He needs that of me. Sometimes it really just takes constant reassurance – and I can give him that. It’s not the world – it’s not the things I want to give him in my heart of selfish hearts – but it’s something that he can at least use.

He can use my honesty, because he’s the sort of person who prides himself on the taste of truth. To a lot of people, I’m sure it tastes bitter, and I reckon there are moments when it does to him too, but, more than that, I think he can taste the sweetness in it. I know how much he values it.

And  _I_  value  _him_.  

I turn back to him as he sinks down into the sand, slumping into the bank of crushed shells and beach shrapnel with the weight of the wretched world pressing down on his shoulders. He buries his face in his palms on his lap, and I see his toes curl as he digs his heels into the crusty sand, and the noise that threads its way unscrupulously between his lips is caught somewhere on a web between a dying sigh and a pitiful groan. The way his shirt hangs from his body makes his frame look more skeletal than usual, his arms more bony and the hollows of his collar more carved out of marble rock. His hair is mused up into a field of ashen-blonde cowlicks, scruffy and unkempt, and I recognise the prickle of untrimmed stubble peppering the line of his jaw where he doesn’t hide his face with his fingers.

I’m drawn to him because I have no choice; no say in the strength of his gravity and the magnetic pull rooted within him that he has no clue about.

Over ninety-nine percent of the human body is composed of eleven elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and some other bits and pieces. It’s the sort of routine fact every medical textbook I ever owned started with, accompanied by a coloured-coded diagram of the body. Sixty-five percent oxygen. Eighteen percent carbon. Ten percent hydrogen. The list goes on, and it’s fact.

I must be the anomaly, because I’ve felt Jean’s magnetism – so I know that things like water, things like bone, things like muscles, and tissues, and protein has got to be a fabrication. Blood is all I have, because blood contains iron, and iron is magnetic.

So, I am iron. Nickel, too. Cobalt, perhaps. But iron mainly, because iron rusts with water. And that’s a parallel I’ve already made and can’t abandon. Jean is a lot of things.

The sand crumbles beneath my bare feet, the grains slipping through the gaps in my toes, and I can’t help the whisper of a smile that is fleeting across my lips – for him. There’s no need more a reason more complicated than that. It doesn’t stop my hands from wringing of their own accord, and the lump of doubt forming from gall in my throat; nor the way his teeth clench and maybe his face threatens to fall when he looks up, blinking against the sun, and meets my searching eyes. His own seem lost, and maybe a little frantic as they focus, but once he finds our string of silver fate, the agitation passes into glossiness behind the eyes and his fingers clenched over the taught denim that covers his knees.

“Jean, I – I want … can I tell you something?” I whisper, my own voice hoarse in my ears; Jean nods dumbly, staring up at me reverently.  I glance away for a second, squeezing my eyes closed in a wordless prayer for courage, and I take a deep breath.

 _I have to be honest with him_.

I kneel in the sand in front of Jean, and he all but vitrifies, stiffening up in an instant and sucking in a sharp breath. He shakes his head and huffs out heavily through his nose, his knuckles whitening and his fingers scratching at his knees – until I still them, pressing my hand tenderly over his. His skin is warm and clammy, but he blanches, all the blood rushing from his face and leaving his pallor sickly white.

I pray that he doesn’t push me away. I know that he ought to, and I know that he has every right to, if that’s what he wants, but I hope – I hope for the best. I hope that he feels the way I squeeze his fingers in mine, and try to meet his eyes with something that tells him of my fondness for everything that he is; I hope he realises how I want to wash away the stroke of fear that surges across his pupils, constricting them against the sunlight, and I want him to know of all the lullabies I would sing to him and whisper in his ear to smooth the hackles of tension from each and every muscle and sinuous tissue rippling beneath his skin.

My heart flutters, but the wings it beats with are stronger than a butterfly; not as weak and glass-thin as an insect buffeted by the wind.  I feel bold muscle and strength and bone and deft feathers, and I’ve never been much one for history, but I know now that the soar towards the sun makes the inevitable plummet back down to earth feel worth it when the wax that glues me together melts away. The feeling of flying in my chest feels good – and even better in that momentary weightlessness when my mind forms the things I want to say to him. Am  _going_  to say to him.

Because what else can I do?

It has to be more than  _just a touch_. Even if my thumb trembles over his knuckles, and my words slither out of my lips thick and soft and padded.

“H-here’s … here’s the truth, Jean,” I gulp, “I … I did wrong by you. I should’ve been more plain with you, Jean. You’re not a burden to me – you have a burden, and I have a burden too, but that’s okay. T-that’s okay, because—”

_Because nothing that you or I have been forced to deal with stops me from wanting to be your friend. Because it doesn’t change how I feel about you. Because it doesn’t make me love you any less._

But I don’t say that – the words congeal inside my mouth and become nothing but sludge, and I’m unable to spit them out, stammering over wordless sounds only. My fingers clench around his, and Jean’s gaze flicks to mine again, wide-eyed and honest, and maybe, just maybe, he believes me, and he knows that his weight is meagre and nothing for me to carry. Something in his eyes spurs me on.

“I did wrong by you,” I repeat, shakingly, “And I— I don’t want to live for the dead, Jean. I don’t. It still hurts, and it probably will for a l-long time, but … I want to move forward.”

I swallow thickly and search desperately across the plains of his expression, but instead the slate is too blank for me to find finger holds and footfalls to cling onto and understand what he’s thinking or how he’s  _feeling_.

So I trust in myself. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do, but equally, the only person I could turn to for advice is the one I’m holding onto with white-knuckle fingers and a hitch in my throat as I clamber over all the things  _I’m_  feeling. I want to move forward. I don’t want to have to live in the shadow of what has happened to me – to us, as well, because I’ve let it affect him too, I know that much – and I don’t want to live a life ruled by the dead. I don’t want to think that I’m not allowed my chance at a share of happiness, just because I’m grieving.

Get pushed down. Get back up again. Take a step forward, even if you don’t know where your compass is pointing to, or what will be there when you get there. Even if I don’t know how he’ll react, or what he’ll say, I have to—

I’ve held onto it for too long, and it’s just … not fair any more.

“You – I want to be there for you,” I continue, “With whatever it is you need … need help with, with whatever things are too heavy for you alone, and I’ll … I can help you lift them. W-whatever this is, I want it. I do – I do, s-so much. Whatever you’ll have of me. S-so, I—”

I pause for breath, and even though it’s a moment that seems to last for an eternity – full of questions of  _what if_ , and fears of what will happen and where we’ll go from here, and pleas from myself not to ruin what we have any further,  _oh dear God, you can’t lose him, don’t push him away again_  – there’s a crystalline sort of clarity. It feels solid and secure and it sparkles just a little under the dawning sunlight, scattering all the worrying whispers that tickle the inner shell of my ear.  

 _I love you, Jean Kirschtein_.  _No, it’s more than that. I’m_ in love _with you._   _I can pretend that other things matter – and they do, and they will – but right now, at this moment, you matter the most. I want to do good by you._

“I need to tell you something, Jean.”

It’s the sort of prayer for which I wish better words existed. It’s going to come out clumsy and pot-holed and not with the eloquence of some well-practiced speech in front of a mirror.

But that’s what he does to me. He makes me nervous – but a good sort of nervous, where the beat of my heart drowns out the other noises in my ears and the thoughts in my head, and makes me feel and think and act irrationally; to realise what’s the point in polite and civil words when you can create anything and be anyone with the way you can string sentences together.

Jean doesn’t move, sat stony-still on the bank of sand and shell, his fingers beneath mine not even twitching, nor the air in his lungs rising. He blinks maybe once, twice, and I guess he waits for poetry.

“Marco?”

Or maybe he waits for nothing at all, because maybe the blank expression on his face really is blank, and he has no clue where I’m going with this, and when it crashes like tidal waves on the shore, he’s going to be so suddenly swept away with it all that I wonder if I’ll come to know the feeling of him wrenching his hand out from underneath mine, in much the same way that I learned what it was like to shoulder him away atop the outlook two weeks ago.

I hope it doesn’t come to that.

There’s colour returning to Jean’s face, and it starts with the blossoming of pretty pink in his cheeks.

“H-hey,” he splutters, “Are you—”

“Just – just give me a second,” I say, drawing my gaze from our overlapping hands to his face once more, and offering him a shy sort of retiring smile, small and meek and maybe just a little coy, if I can muster a feeling like that. It’s a smile for him, but I can feel how it fills me with currents of air and weightlessness that can’t come from boundless metal or water foreboding, but only from the way the tight line of his lips rolls into an o-shape without his realising, and the blush in his cheeks is like the strain of blotted paint against his white skin – vibrant and sun-kissed and all sorts of shy that tickle my heart like the lick of a feather.

God, he’s beautiful. Even now, when he’s wobbling this side and that of unsure, and I’m rocking his centre of balance and tripping him off kilter, and I can see how he doesn’t quite know which way to lean, but that he wants to lean none the less, and my smile for him only grows in its stupored fondness, and it’s  _now or not at all_.

(Well, maybe it’s not. It’s just that I think I could manage that poetry he so loves yet shies away from, and now seems as good a time as any. I  _need_  to tell him. I  _want_  him to know.)

(Be brave, Marco.)

The sea breeze ruffles the ashen-blonde strands of Jean’s hair, and for a moment he looks younger. Not child-like, but replenished, as if the wind smoothes away the dark circles beneath his eyes from sleeping so little and worrying so much, and caulks the wounds dealt to him as little crevices of frown lines between his eyebrows and a the corners of his eyes.

The words trickle out like wellspring water, quenching and revitalising, unlike the chafe of salt water on the back of the throat that happens even without swallowing a mouthful. It’s like plunging a hand into a cold spring of a fountain, bubbling up from between grassy rocks and the earth, and the current caressing your fingers like something soft and round yet not tangible when you try your hardest to grab it. It makes you feel young – not a fountain of youth, but something close.

The water here doesn’t taste like earthy or grass or loam; it mixes with brine as it rises in the air and fills my lungs with the taste of the sea as my lips form the words I’ve been wanting to tell Jean for so long now that the days are not days and the weeks are not weeks, just an inordinate amount of time spent wishing for longer spent sat at his side or holding his hand.  

“Jean, I— I fell in love with you like droplets in the ocean. Every facet of you was just a drip, but— but the ripples they caused were massive. I … all those times I should’ve been more plain with you;  _I’m in love with you_.”

And there it is. I’ve held onto these words for such a long time, and now, they’re his as much as they’re mine.

I stretch up on my knees and squeeze his fingers in mine, and gently press my lips to the corner of his mouth. His skin is baby-soft, despite the prickle of a five o’clock shadow, and I feel him twitch.

_Remember this. It might have to last you a long time, Marco._

I’ve dreamed too many times about kissing Jean – and this is barely a kiss – but the taste of salt that sticks to my lips is enough. I let it linger for a few seconds longer than I deserve, feeling how his skin moves as his own lips gently part, and then—

And then, my time is up. Enough. That’s enough fooling myself into believing in happiness and fairy-tale endings.

I pull back, and Jean is gawking, his eyes wide. Is he angry? He might be. Oh God, he might be.

“I had to do that,” I whisper, as if saying that will cure me of the feeling of the quirk of his lips lingering on my mouth. I peel my fingers away from the back of his hand, and it’s like wrenching skin from superglue, but I have to, because it looks like he’s angry, it looks like he’s going to be angry when his mind catches up with where I just pressed my lips and what I just told him— “At least once.”

 _At least once_. That’s cruel. It’s true, but it’s cruel. I would do it again – I would kiss him again, if he would just not look at me like that.  _Please stop, Jean. Please don’t look at me like that – I had to. I had to. I can’t cope with this anymore. I couldn’t wait for tomorrow to become today to become yesterday. I couldn’t wait for that. I had to._

Jean’s fingers on his knees curl up into fists, and he fights the tremble that makes the white tendons in the backs of his hands spasm. He is still gawping at me in open-mouthed shock, but for a fleeting second, I wonder how quickly it will turn to him wanting to hit me.

““A-and, I’m – I’m sorry if I just made it awkward,” I splutter, my whole body shivering as I expel one, shaking, shuddering breath. I lift the hand that I had wrapped around his fingers, and press it flat against my sternum, feeling the heave of my chest, and imagining – or maybe, truly  _hearing_  – my heart like thunder battering against my ribcage. “It was— I’ve been keeping it in here too long. B-but … it should be yours as much as mine. I had to tell you.”

_I had to. Being sad for so long is unbearable. I had to tell you, Jean._

I rock back on my thighs and dig my fingers into the checked fabric of my pyjama pants, staring hard at how the fabric rumples and I remind myself of a small child clinging onto anything his grubby hands can reach for security.

Jean’s eyes are moon-wide, pricked bright with how the white sun glares across the sea at us. Somehow, he manages to speak, although it’s barely words. It’s just my name. It makes the lurch of my heart ever more painful, because I’m reminded of every time I felt that fluttering feeling in the past, the swarm of giddy butterflies in my stomach, when he lips rounded out the vowels of my name, as if my mother named me Marco so that he could say it.

“M-Marco, I—”

He can’t say anymore. A small groan of frustration rises in his throat, prying his lips a part, and it sounds  _pained_.

I don’t know what to do. All I can think about is the noble slope of his nose, and the sharpness of his jaw, and the way his hair falls across his forehead. All I can remember is what it felt like to feel his arms wrap around me on his rooftop, or the plush of his pillow as I curled up in his bed, or how every word stung like sour poison on the outlook when I told him to  _just go_.

All I can think about is how I was an idiot for thinking I needed him to make me happy again, whilst the truth is not that. It can’t be that. It’s not healthy, it’s not happy, it’s a disservice to us both. I want him. I don’t need him. I want him.

Just to be my friend. Just to  _still_  want to be my friend.

But maybe I might have to settle with just knowing I  _was_  happy when I was with him. I was so happy. I will treasure that, even when he finds the words to tell me  _Marco, I don’t like you like that. I’m not actually into guys._   _I’m not into you. It’s too complicated._

“I … I understand if we can’t back to the way it was before,” I stammer. “That’s … well, it’s not  _okay_ , but if we can’t … if we can’t, I understand why – I do. B-but I … I’m not looking back now, Jean, I can’t—”

I feel petrified to the spot in front of him, and the grains of sand cut into my knees through my pyjama pants. I don’t want to run. I think Jean probably wants to run, but he’s forgotten how to move his legs. He probably resents that fact. He probably—

“Marco, h-hey— listen a sec—”

He reaches out for me, but I shake my head vehemently.

“I had to say those things— I had to, I had to— just please don’t hate me for it, I had to—”

_Please just be my friend—_

The breath is  _hammered_  out of my lungs as Jean launches himself at me, tackling me backwards into the sand. We tumble over, a collection of flailing legs tangled together, and his hands anvilled on my shoulders, and my arms scrambling for hold on his shirt as my head hits the sand and the shell with a brittle  _thud_.

Jean yelps – I don’t think he realises the noise comes from his lips, as if he’s just as surprised as me to have pinned me down beneath his meagre weight – and I’m winded, sucking in a splintering puff of air that sounds like a squeak.

I stare up at him,  _bewildered_ , stuttering and stumbling over disbelieving noises as his knees clench either side of my hips and he presses the heels of his palms into my collarbones. His entire body  _heaves_  with heavy, laboured breaths, and his pupils are blown, matching the red flare that strikes up like a match in his cheeks, spreading down his neck and up to the tips of his ears.

This is— this is—

His fingers stutter over the curve of my neck, irresolute and fumbling and clumsy enough for the both of us as he feels his way across the prickle of my unshaven jaw too, and— and—

A hitched whimper catches in my throat, and it makes Jean shake his head. But it’s not angry. It’s not angry, it’s— he traces my cheeks with his thumbs and I feel my own flesh boil beneath my skin as molten metal, dragging up towards his magnetic touch in a way that makes me realise that I cannot feel its leaden weight, I—

Jean cups my face in his slender, willowy hands, and when he exhales through his nose, I feel the breath on my forehead. He bites his lip with the flash of white teeth, and I swear I must be dreaming – yet dreaming with the rush of the sea and the smell of salt and the weight of him pressing down on my thighs and leaning into my chest, and it feels so real, that surely it cannot be anything but—

 _Jean_.

“I like you too, you  _idiot_.”

 _Y-you do_ —?

Jean’s lips crash into mine before I even realise that they’re his lips. Jean’s lips, Jean’s breath, Jean’s taste; things that can’t be real, but yet are guided by the puppet strings of his hands holding my jaw steady and the meld of his mouth with mine and the sound of tiny, heady little gasps – which I realise _belong to me_.

His nose bumps against mine and our teeth click as I feel the flick of his tongue clumsily,  _messily_  along my lower lip; he tangls his fingers with a desperate, iron-smelt grip in my hair, tugging at my roots until I squirm, drowning in  _Jean, and Jean, and Jean_. Things growing, let loose, and  _flying_ , and—

 _Jean_.

Oh God, this is real.

My hands scramble for touch – for a greater touch, a  _closer_  touch – and my fingers drag up the sides of his thighs, feeling my way up the seams of coarse, sand-stuck denim, across his hips, the ridges of his ribs through his shirt, sneaking beneath his arms to splay my palms flat against his shoulder blades—

Jean’s skin burns, or maybe it’s my own that leaves scorch marks across his back, feeling and moulding to each ripple of muscle as he rocks against me and kisses me tenderly, desperately, with every fibre of every  _thing_  that I ever felt, and that he ever felt, and oh, this can’t be real, but—

I squeeze him tight and pull him flush against my chest and he wheezes against my lips, breaking away with a trembling breath that is hot and humid against my blood-rushed skin and kiss-swollen mouth.

 _Kiss_.

_I— I just—_

Jean twines his arms around my neck as best he can, and I feel sand tickle the back of my neck and slip down the inside of my shirt, but I can’t care – not about that. It’s his eyes, and how they scatter the sunlight, and how he  _glows_  when his lips quirk up into a grin that pulls a choking sort of whimper from my chest by a silver thread.

He presses his forehead against mine and brushes out noses together, fingers stroking my cheeks tenderly.

 _Sweet, sweet thing, I love you so much_ —

“You’re a God-damn idiot,” he breathes, with eloquence that can only be his; that even with his gruffness and crass choice of words, he can still make my laughter bubble and simper and giggle within my chest.

His fingers swirl through my hair, drawing circles with his blunt nails on my scalp, and I pull him down closer, closer still—  _not close enough_. My chest rises and falls in unison with his, my breaths deep and lumbering, and his still so short and frantic and pumped up on an ecstatic mix of the wild adrenaline in his eyes, and the surge of something brilliant and bold and bright in the candle of his smile.

You’re— you’re an idiot— idiot,” he hushes. “And I just—”

His eyes roam over my lips and I barely see the  _spark_  before he’s ducking his head again and I taste the sea salt as it’s poured into my mouth, mingling with the way he tastes sweet and honest and so, so  _beautiful_.

He tugs urgently at my hair, and grabbles for any hold he can find, some firecracker spirit driving the way he touches and breathes and dares and  _kisses_.

Somewhere, it becomes not a kiss, but a promise. An apology, a truth, a hug that would bowl me over if I weren’t already lying flat on my back in the sand, with Jean spread on top of me, shaking as he buries his face in my shoulder and it feels like he’s sobbing dryly. I rub my hands up and down his back, feeling the ripples of his spine that match the seismic tremors of my own, and try to match the stroke of my fingers to the languid whistle of the tide beyond and behind us, in how it laves the shore.

I nuzzle my way into the crook of his neck, squishing my nose against where blood pulses warm and wonderful beneath his milky skin, and I breathe in the smell of salt and sea and sweat and him— even the traces of that darn chocolate  _Axe_ , faintly musky as it lingers where he’s rubbed it onto his collarbones.

My lips form kisses of their own, peppering his neck with little butterflies that take flight of their own accord, the flap of each set of wings making Jean’s breath hitch and his fingers twist and tighten in my hair. I tell him silently with each kiss that he’s beautiful, that I love him, that I’m sorry, that this can’t be real because what is happiness when it comes to us— it’s not real, it can’t be— but it is. Oh God, I feel it stretching its roots in my soul, and it flowers like blossom in the spring, all bold and brilliant and incandescent against a vast and endless blue sky.

Jean whimpers, and it’s such a  _pretty_  little noise from someone who doesn’t want people to know that he can be so delicate and so empathetic, that the hairs on the back of my neck and on my arms  _prickle_  to attention when I feel his knees squeeze around my sides.

He’s beautiful, he’s  _beautiful_ , I can’t say it enough, because he is— and I want him to know, I want him to see what I see, and believe that every moment I’ve been able to spend next to him I would never trade for anything, and that he’s  _beautiful_ —

Jean sits upright abruptly, peeling himself away from being flush against my chest; he holds himself up on his hands, wiggling back onto my thighs, to stare over my head at the sea. There’s concern that flashes across his expression, and I figure he resents it, because his eyebrows crease into a light scowl as he glares at the waves that are undoubtedly trying to creep their way towards us, without his knowledge.

I try to lean back, to tilt my head backwards into the sand and peer upside down at the ocean, but instead I only get two eyefuls full of cloudless, blue sky, accented by the early morning sun.  I huff, and glide my hands down his back and across his ribs, holding him securely at the waist as I wriggle myself into a sitting position. Sand sprinkles out of my hair, dusting across my shoulders and trickling down the creases in my shirt, into my lap and his. I curl a hand around his waist, sliding him as far forward into my lap as possible, and dare to cup his face with my other, gracing the pink dusting on his cheek with my thumb as I smooth a gentle arc across his skin, just beneath his eyelashes – and I know that the smile that blooms loud and proud and loving on my lips is simply, for him. A combination of all his facets, sharp and rough and smooth and more than plentiful; his brashness and his braveness, his kindness and his shy, compassionate empathy – all of him.  _Just_  for him.

Just being in his orbit eclipses everything else for a blissful moment – the sea and the sun, the other people sleeping soundly in the tent, all the worries that ever kept us up at night – he is the sun and the moon and their shadows that fall across all the things I don’t have to think about for as long as he stays this close to me, and reverently sweeps his hands across my chest, marvelling at how hotly my skin burns for him, and how my heart rattles. He twists his fingers in my t-shirt, and I watch him fight back the grin that threatens the thin line of his lips, mirroring my own – but he falls foul of the temptation, and he  _grins_. He grins.

“The tide’s coming in,” I hum, letting my fingers roam tentatively across the slope of his waist, and whilst he twitches when the pressure becomes too unbaringly light, he doesn’t snap his gaze away from following every contour of my face, scouring my cheeks, my eyes, my lips.

“Uh-huh,” he nods, and I scoff, jabbing him a little more pointedly in the ribs.

“I think we should move,” I say breathlessly.

“Uh-huh.”

I laugh giddily, biting my tongue between my teeth as I can’t  _believe_  him, I can’t believe how—

I guide my thumb from his cheek to his lips, dabbing the pad against the slight chafing and the pretty pink swell, and God, how he parts his mouth just barely for me and my worshiping intrigue at how breath-stealing he is – but I don’t want to do anything but touch. I trace the shape of his quirked, crooked smile; soft, pliant, creased around the edges with shallow, heartthrob dimples; a little puff of wet breath; a slip of his tongue as he wets his lip involuntarily.

A chuckle slips its way up and out of my throat, giddy and dopey, breathy in a way that I can’t control, and cloud-high – if there were any clouds in the sky to match the altitude at which I feel.

“ _Jean_ ,” I chuckle, and the vowels in his name taste nothing of salt, taste nothing of sweet – only  _right_. Very right.

I shift him a little on my thighs, keeping my hands glued firmly to his sides, holding him steady as I move my hips. He bites down on his lip, rising onto his knees with the movement as he ducks his gaze, focussed determinedly on the folds of fabric in my bed shirt, and how his tightly-wound fingers cause creases where his knuckles brush against my skin through the jersey.

 _Very right_.                                                                                                                             


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